Skip to content

AI company files for bankruptcy after being exposed as 700 Indian engineers - Dexerto

Technology
133 103 3.1k
  • 100%, but i dont think that will stay true for too long.

    In the meantime. This is a valid business model.

  • Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth

    Who names this shit? I want to have a serious talk with their mother.

    OracleMaker was too problematic.

  • Yeah the whole AWS ecosystem has a super shitty naming. Everybody knows S3, but what kind of name is that? All the other services are no better

    Simple Storage Service

    E: I agree that their names are shit though. But S3 makes sense (once you know what it means). Just like boto3 makes sense (once you know what it means)

  • Isn't this exactly what was exposed at the Amazon "Just Walk Out" stores? Turns out all the cameras and sensors weren't good enough, so they paid thousands of people in India to watch videos and correct checkouts. They basically just outsourced the position of cashier, while pretending it was all done automatically!

    I built some of the components that went in to the test locations. Amazon had absurdly tight tolerances for the parts they were buying. They effectively wanted a shelf that was also a scale, and the tolerances they demanded weren't really necessary. So it was an insane expense but they paid it and wouldn't hear otherwise.

    My company also made most of the lockers they're using in places like Whole Foods, and Amazon insisted on controlling the entire design process themselves. They sent us prints, we made parts. They made it very clear that that was the relationship they wanted, so we complied. No test runs, THAT would be too expensive. Let's just make ten thousand parts and put them together.

    I would like to be very clear that in an industrial setting, this is unusual. You need something specific, you call a company that makes things like it and see if they can make what you need. You have a conversation about what you need it for and how many you want. The relationship is personal, you get to know the people around the region that you need stuff from.

    Amazon swooping in with a heavy purse and a list of demands is weird, when someone kicks in your door with a stack of prints and enough money to keep the entire plant in overtime all year, it's hard to say no to that.

    So the first batch of prints they send is wrong. Parts do not line up right and the doors don't even fit. We didn't discover this until 70% of the components had already been painted.

    Second batch they assure us addresses the problem, we need to start over.

    My friends, it did not address the problem. Half the changes they needed to make they didn't. The doors still did not fit.

    3rd try, we lied and said we needed some extra time because a different client had elbowed in with a large order while they were redesigning. We had an intern recreate every print in CAD and test fit it, we ran a single batch of test pieces to assemble one row of lockers and as we were doing that they sent a revision.

    They finally got their lockers, and asked for basically book dividers but insisted again on insanely tight tolerances.

    After the dividers went out we stopped taking their calls.

  • Shit in My Hands?

    Is there any other way?

  • Simple Storage Service

    E: I agree that their names are shit though. But S3 makes sense (once you know what it means). Just like boto3 makes sense (once you know what it means)

    Probably inspired by the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company, or 3m for short

  • It says it's been doing this for 8 years. So, since AI hasn't even been around that long, does that mean they were always like this and just lied that they switched over to AI? I wonder if they just encouraged the current employees to field the response and then they would run it through another AI to provide answers. Either way there had to be some delay which I feel would have been the dead giveaway?

    People have been scamming AI for way longer than 8 years. Eight years ago I had a colleague who used to work for an AI start-up that he said was actually a room full of old ladies.

  • This post did not contain any content.

    What do you mean the new llm I invested in is just 700 Indians in a trench coat?!

  • It says it's been doing this for 8 years. So, since AI hasn't even been around that long, does that mean they were always like this and just lied that they switched over to AI? I wonder if they just encouraged the current employees to field the response and then they would run it through another AI to provide answers. Either way there had to be some delay which I feel would have been the dead giveaway?

    AI is way older than the public release of ChatGPT. GPT-1, OpenAI's first version of what would become ChatGPT, was released in 2018, for example, and OpenAI itself was founded in 2015, DeepMind was founded 2010, and IBM Watson competed on Jeopardy! in 2011. Furthermore, Alan Turing wrote about a lot of the ideas that are now being used in AI research in the 1940s, fuzzy logic and natural language processing were developed in the 1960s, and so on. This stuff didn't come out of nowhere, you just didn't know about it before ChatGPT.

  • In the meantime. This is a valid business model.

    Depends what you mean by "valid". If you mean "profitable", sure: Fraud has always been a profitable business model.

    But if you mean "valid" in terms of what Microsoft got out of their $455M investment, not so much, as they wanted a great new AI model, not the output that the "human-powered" model produced pretending to be an AI.

  • I built some of the components that went in to the test locations. Amazon had absurdly tight tolerances for the parts they were buying. They effectively wanted a shelf that was also a scale, and the tolerances they demanded weren't really necessary. So it was an insane expense but they paid it and wouldn't hear otherwise.

    My company also made most of the lockers they're using in places like Whole Foods, and Amazon insisted on controlling the entire design process themselves. They sent us prints, we made parts. They made it very clear that that was the relationship they wanted, so we complied. No test runs, THAT would be too expensive. Let's just make ten thousand parts and put them together.

    I would like to be very clear that in an industrial setting, this is unusual. You need something specific, you call a company that makes things like it and see if they can make what you need. You have a conversation about what you need it for and how many you want. The relationship is personal, you get to know the people around the region that you need stuff from.

    Amazon swooping in with a heavy purse and a list of demands is weird, when someone kicks in your door with a stack of prints and enough money to keep the entire plant in overtime all year, it's hard to say no to that.

    So the first batch of prints they send is wrong. Parts do not line up right and the doors don't even fit. We didn't discover this until 70% of the components had already been painted.

    Second batch they assure us addresses the problem, we need to start over.

    My friends, it did not address the problem. Half the changes they needed to make they didn't. The doors still did not fit.

    3rd try, we lied and said we needed some extra time because a different client had elbowed in with a large order while they were redesigning. We had an intern recreate every print in CAD and test fit it, we ran a single batch of test pieces to assemble one row of lockers and as we were doing that they sent a revision.

    They finally got their lockers, and asked for basically book dividers but insisted again on insanely tight tolerances.

    After the dividers went out we stopped taking their calls.

    Sometimes you have a run in with a customer that ain't worth having-- no matter how much money they pay.

  • Oh my god I miss peak dogelore so much. I wasted so much time making those memes, and I miss it 😢

  • I built some of the components that went in to the test locations. Amazon had absurdly tight tolerances for the parts they were buying. They effectively wanted a shelf that was also a scale, and the tolerances they demanded weren't really necessary. So it was an insane expense but they paid it and wouldn't hear otherwise.

    My company also made most of the lockers they're using in places like Whole Foods, and Amazon insisted on controlling the entire design process themselves. They sent us prints, we made parts. They made it very clear that that was the relationship they wanted, so we complied. No test runs, THAT would be too expensive. Let's just make ten thousand parts and put them together.

    I would like to be very clear that in an industrial setting, this is unusual. You need something specific, you call a company that makes things like it and see if they can make what you need. You have a conversation about what you need it for and how many you want. The relationship is personal, you get to know the people around the region that you need stuff from.

    Amazon swooping in with a heavy purse and a list of demands is weird, when someone kicks in your door with a stack of prints and enough money to keep the entire plant in overtime all year, it's hard to say no to that.

    So the first batch of prints they send is wrong. Parts do not line up right and the doors don't even fit. We didn't discover this until 70% of the components had already been painted.

    Second batch they assure us addresses the problem, we need to start over.

    My friends, it did not address the problem. Half the changes they needed to make they didn't. The doors still did not fit.

    3rd try, we lied and said we needed some extra time because a different client had elbowed in with a large order while they were redesigning. We had an intern recreate every print in CAD and test fit it, we ran a single batch of test pieces to assemble one row of lockers and as we were doing that they sent a revision.

    They finally got their lockers, and asked for basically book dividers but insisted again on insanely tight tolerances.

    After the dividers went out we stopped taking their calls.

    I worked as an associate for a public accounting firm that does not ever advertise itself, because we specialized serving ultra wealthy individuals and you could only engage us if you knew of us through such circles.

    One day, our office got a call from the personal assistant to someone very wealthy who is known for abusing ketamine, asking for an engagement on a very unusual and complex tax situation. A call was set up to discuss the scope of the engagement, because the partners have always been very particular about what clients they will take on, because really wealthy individuals are often very unpleasant, stressful, & frustrating to work with.

    Apparently during the call the assistant was patronizing, like we should feel flattered that we were chosen by m'lord, and demanded non-negotiable terms that we would conduct our work exactly as told with no questions asked. They had even sent their own engagement letter for us to sign with them ahead of the call, and it was completely absurd.

    The partners patiently explained that is not possible, as that is not how this type of professional relationship works, and declined the engagement.

    The assistant was losing their mind, shocked we would turn such an opportunity down. They offered even more money and even some compromise, but the way they initiated the interaction set the tone to expect throughout the professional relationship.

    I was very impressed by the partners in the sense that I knew they were incredibly greedy people, but they are so fucking intelligent and had such a great instinct to avoid clients that were going to end up costing way more money than they brought in, because us associates would absolutely refuse to deal with bullshit because it was already a super stressful job, and we were way too talented and incredibly expensive to replace if we walked off.

    The self restraint must have been legendary, and exactly the right call, because all the professionals that do end up accepting end up getting embroiled in costly lawsuits and getting thrown under the bus.

    Anyway, I hated that job and I wish I that quit sooner than I did. I got such bad burnout, I developed PTSD and now I prefer just living like a hobo rather than go back out there.

    PS: Fuck capitalism and fuck Amazon. I refuse to buy anything from them ever again. Cancelled my credit card and told them to go fuck themselves. Fascists.

  • Oh my god I miss peak dogelore so much. I wasted so much time making those memes, and I miss it 😢

    It was a simpler time 🥲

  • Next do "self driving cars"

    You mean the 40 horsepower is actually 40 Indians under the hood??

  • Next I'm going to find out ChatGPT is 700 thousand Indians typing really fast.

    But all sharing the same keyboard? I need to understand the logistics behind that feat

  • I built some of the components that went in to the test locations. Amazon had absurdly tight tolerances for the parts they were buying. They effectively wanted a shelf that was also a scale, and the tolerances they demanded weren't really necessary. So it was an insane expense but they paid it and wouldn't hear otherwise.

    My company also made most of the lockers they're using in places like Whole Foods, and Amazon insisted on controlling the entire design process themselves. They sent us prints, we made parts. They made it very clear that that was the relationship they wanted, so we complied. No test runs, THAT would be too expensive. Let's just make ten thousand parts and put them together.

    I would like to be very clear that in an industrial setting, this is unusual. You need something specific, you call a company that makes things like it and see if they can make what you need. You have a conversation about what you need it for and how many you want. The relationship is personal, you get to know the people around the region that you need stuff from.

    Amazon swooping in with a heavy purse and a list of demands is weird, when someone kicks in your door with a stack of prints and enough money to keep the entire plant in overtime all year, it's hard to say no to that.

    So the first batch of prints they send is wrong. Parts do not line up right and the doors don't even fit. We didn't discover this until 70% of the components had already been painted.

    Second batch they assure us addresses the problem, we need to start over.

    My friends, it did not address the problem. Half the changes they needed to make they didn't. The doors still did not fit.

    3rd try, we lied and said we needed some extra time because a different client had elbowed in with a large order while they were redesigning. We had an intern recreate every print in CAD and test fit it, we ran a single batch of test pieces to assemble one row of lockers and as we were doing that they sent a revision.

    They finally got their lockers, and asked for basically book dividers but insisted again on insanely tight tolerances.

    After the dividers went out we stopped taking their calls.

    Amazon be smokin that meth again.

  • 100%, but i dont think that will stay true for too long.

    Of course. Just one more nuclear reactor bro, just one more trillion dollars investment bro

  • Yeah the whole AWS ecosystem has a super shitty naming. Everybody knows S3, but what kind of name is that? All the other services are no better

    Still better than EC2 and the likes. Where is EC1? And what about 3?

  • But all sharing the same keyboard? I need to understand the logistics behind that feat

    They wouldn't be able to type fast enough if they weren't using the same keyboard.

  • 24 Stimmen
    4 Beiträge
    0 Aufrufe
    S
    Microsoft is following in the grand tradition of IBM. Assisting in genocide.
  • 175 Stimmen
    17 Beiträge
    74 Aufrufe
    T
    Ah yes, my comment clearly indicated Starlink was the sole cause an no additional satelites in various orbits will ever be needed, desired or will ever be launched by any other country because we are done and have all we need, forever. You are clearly very smart. I am so happy you are here to protect us from saying something stupid. That would be embarassing.
  • Fiat Punto 2 Hgt II (2) 130 16S ABARTH 3P "le grand travailleur"

    Technology technology
    1
    2
    0 Stimmen
    1 Beiträge
    19 Aufrufe
    Niemand hat geantwortet
  • We need to stop pretending AI is intelligent

    Technology technology
    331
    1
    1k Stimmen
    331 Beiträge
    3k Aufrufe
    dsilverz@friendica.worldD
    @technocrit While I agree with the main point that "AI/LLMs has/have no agency", I must be the boring, ackchyually person who points out and remembers some nerdy things.tl;dr: indeed, AIs and LLMs aren't intelligent... we aren't so intelligent as we think we are, either, because we hold no "exclusivity" of intelligence among biosphere (corvids, dolphins, etc) and because there's no such thing as non-deterministic "intelligence". We're just biologically compelled to think that we can think and we're the only ones to think, and this is just anthropocentric and naive from us (yeah, me included).If you have the patience to read a long and quite verbose text, it's below. If you don't, well, no problems, just stick to my tl;dr above.-----First and foremost, everything is ruled by physics. Deep down, everything is just energy and matter (the former of which, to quote the famous Einstein equation e = mc, is energy as well), and this inexorably includes living beings.Bodies, flesh, brains, nerves and other biological parts, they're not so different from a computer case, CPUs/NPUs/TPUs, cables and other computer parts: to quote Sagan, it's all "made of star stuff", it's all a bunch of quarks and other elementary particles clumped together and forming subatomic particles forming atoms forming molecules forming everything we know, including our very selves...Everything is compelled to follow the same laws of physics, everything is subjected to the same cosmic principles, everything is subjected to the same fundamental forces, everything is subjected to the same entropy, everything decays and ends (and this comment is just a reminder, a cosmic-wide Memento mori).It's bleak, but this is the cosmic reality: cosmos is simply indifferent to all existence, and we're essentially no different than our fancy "tools", be it the wheel, the hammer, the steam engine, the Voyager twins or the modern dystopian electronic devices crafted to follow pieces of logical instructions, some of which were labelled by developers as "Markov Chains" and "Artificial Neural Networks".Then, there's also the human non-exclusivity among the biosphere: corvids (especially Corvus moneduloides, the New Caleidonian crow) are scientifically known for their intelligence, so are dolphins, chimpanzees and many other eukaryotas. Humans love to think we're exclusive in that regard, but we're not, we're just fooling ourselves!IMHO, every time we try to argue "there's no intelligence beyond humans", it's highly anthropocentric and quite biased/bigoted against the countless other species that currently exist on Earth (and possibly beyond this Pale Blue Dot as well). We humans often forgot how we are species ourselves (taxonomically classified as "Homo sapiens"). We tend to carry on our biological existences as if we were some kind of "deities" or "extraterrestrials" among a "primitive, wild life".Furthermore, I can point out the myriad of philosophical points, such as the philosophical point raised by the mere mention of "senses" ("Because it’s bodiless. It has no senses, ..." "my senses deceive me" is the starting point for Cartesian (René Descartes) doubt. While Descarte's conclusion, "Cogito ergo sum", is highly anthropocentric, it's often ignored or forgotten by those who hold anthropocentric views on intelligence, as people often ground the seemingly "exclusive" nature of human intelligence on the ability to "feel".Many other philosophical musings deserve to be mentioned as well: lack of free will (stemming from the very fact that we were unable to choose our own births), the nature of "evil" (both the Hobbesian line regarding "human evilness" and the Epicurean paradox regarding "metaphysical evilness"), the social compliance (I must point out to documentaries from Derren Brown on this subject), the inevitability of Death, among other deep topics.All deep principles and ideas converging, IMHO, into the same bleak reality, one where we (supposedly "soul-bearing beings") are no different from a "souless" machine, because we're both part of an emergent phenomena (Ordo ab chao, the (apparent) order out of chaos) that has been taking place for Æons (billions of years and beyond, since the dawn of time itself).Yeah, I know how unpopular this worldview can be and how downvoted this comment will probably get. Still I don't care: someone who gazed into the abyss must remember how the abyss always gazes us, even those of us who didn't dare to gaze into the abyss yet.I'm someone compelled by my very neurodivergent nature to remember how we humans are just another fleeting arrangement of interconnected subsystems known as "biological organism", one of which "managed" to throw stuff beyond the atmosphere (spacecrafts) while still unable to understand ourselves. We're biologically programmed, just like the other living beings, to "fear Death", even though our very cells are programmed to terminate on a regular basis (apoptosis) and we're are subjected to the inexorable chronological falling towards "cosmic chaos" (entropy, as defined, "as time passes, the degree of disorder increases irreversibly").
  • 17 Stimmen
    5 Beiträge
    62 Aufrufe
    A
    Why would the article’s credited authors pass up the chance to improve their own health status and health satisfaction?
  • Using Signal groups for activism

    Technology technology
    37
    1
    204 Stimmen
    37 Beiträge
    351 Aufrufe
    ulrich@feddit.orgU
    You're using a messaging app that was built with the express intent of being private and encrypted. Yes. You're asking why you can't have a right to privacy when you use your real name as your display handle in order to hide your phone number. I didn't ask anything. I stated it definitively. If you then use personal details as your screen name, you can't get mad at the app for not hiding your personal details. I've already explained this. I am not mad. I am telling you why it's a bad product for activism. Chatting with your friends and clients isn't what this app is for. That's...exactly what it's for. And I don't know where you got the idea that it's not. It's absurd. Certainly Snowden never said anything of the sort. Signal themselves never said anything of the sort. There are other apps for that. Of course there are. They're varying degrees of not private, secure, or easy to use.
  • 366 Stimmen
    27 Beiträge
    375 Aufrufe
    P
    They're like "Wahhh we need to hit 3.5% and then the fascist dictator will totally resign!" and then Trump is like "Oooo my delicate little feefees, oh well, here comes my Gestapo!" while the 50501 protest marshalls chant "We did it! We don't need crushing violence to make a change!" while completely ignoring that the NKD protests accomplished literally nothing.
  • Why doesn't Nvidia have more competition?

    Technology technology
    22
    1
    33 Stimmen
    22 Beiträge
    237 Aufrufe
    B
    It’s funny how the article asks the question, but completely fails to answer it. About 15 years ago, Nvidia discovered there was a demand for compute in datacenters that could be met with powerful GPU’s, and they were quick to respond to it, and they had the resources to focus on it strongly, because of their huge success and high profitability in the GPU market. AMD also saw the market, and wanted to pursue it, but just over a decade ago where it began to clearly show the high potential for profitability, AMD was near bankrupt, and was very hard pressed to finance developments on GPU and compute in datacenters. AMD really tried the best they could, and was moderately successful from a technology perspective, but Nvidia already had a head start, and the proprietary development system CUDA was already an established standard that was very hard to penetrate. Intel simply fumbled the ball from start to finish. After a decade of trying to push ARM down from having the mobile crown by far, investing billions or actually the equivalent of ARM’s total revenue. They never managed to catch up to ARM despite they had the better production process at the time. This was the main focus of Intel, and Intel believed that GPU would never be more than a niche product. So when intel tried to compete on compute for datacenters, they tried to do it with X86 chips, One of their most bold efforts was to build a monstrosity of a cluster of Celeron chips, which of course performed laughably bad compared to Nvidia! Because as it turns out, the way forward at least for now, is indeed the massively parralel compute capability of a GPU, which Nvidia has refined for decades, only with (inferior) competition from AMD. But despite the lack of competition, Nvidia did not slow down, in fact with increased profits, they only grew bolder in their efforts. Making it even harder to catch up. Now AMD has had more money to compete for a while, and they do have some decent compute units, but Nvidia remains ahead and the CUDA problem is still there, so for AMD to really compete with Nvidia, they have to be better to attract customers. That’s a very tall order against Nvidia that simply seems to never stop progressing. So the only other option for AMD is to sell a bit cheaper. Which I suppose they have to. AMD and Intel were the obvious competitors, everybody else is coming from even further behind. But if I had to make a bet, it would be on Huawei. Huawei has some crazy good developers, and Trump is basically forcing them to figure it out themselves, because he is blocking Huawei and China in general from using both AMD and Nvidia AI chips. And the chips will probably be made by Chinese SMIC, because they are also prevented from using advanced production in the west, most notably TSMC. China will prevail, because it’s become a national project, of both prestige and necessity, and they have a massive talent mass and resources, so nothing can stop it now. IMO USA would clearly have been better off allowing China to use American chips. Now China will soon compete directly on both production and design too.